Sunday Pages: "The Magi"

A poem by William Butler Yeats

Dear Reader,

Merry Christmas!

Today is Christmas Eve—which is to say, the evening before Christmas—which is to say, Christ’s Mass—which is to say, as “Silent Night” puts it, “the night of our true Savior’s birth”: the Nativity.

There is much to debate on the historicity of Jesus, starting with his actual birthday. December 25th was when the winter solstice fell in A.D. 274. The Roman emperor at the time, Aurelian, a sort of proto-Napoleon, proclaimed that fixed date the Natalis Solis Invicti: the Festival of the Sun God. Early Christians, who in those days worshiped in secret for fear of being made into cat food, could not celebrate the birth of Jesus out in the open. So they adopted December 25th as “Christ’s Mass” to avoid persecution. No one knows His actual birthday.

Likewise, the nativity story is pretty clearly a later embellishment. The Gospels, remember, were written a generation after Jesus’ death—and after the Romans razed Jerusalem to put down the Jewish rebellion, destroying all documents in the process. Jesus’ birth is not mentioned at all in Mark, glossed over in John, and presented differently in Matthew and Luke. And the story, as even the most earnest Christian will admit, strains credulity. Even as a kid in church, I had all kinds of questions: Is the census really so important that Joseph can’t wait a few weeks until his wife gives birth to make the trek? Why does Mary have to go at all? There isn’t a single innkeeper in Bethlehem who would notice the very pregnant woman and take her in? Wouldn’t the God we know to be extremely vengeful take notice of this slight of the mother of His child and smite the innkeepers? Why do they get off unscathed? Shepherds somehow know to show up at the barn—but not a single midwife? (Seriously, most nativity sets contain at least six human figures, not counting the baby Jesus, and only one of them is a woman. A birth scene with mostly dudes? Really? What is this, the Mojo Dojo Jesu House?) Does the family really stay out back with the goats and the donkeys long enough for wise men from faraway lands to show up bearing gifts? Where do the wise men stay? Were they wise enough to have made reservations? Has not a single room opened up during that interval? The Christmas story is so incredible that it sows doubt on the entire enterprise. I’m sure that, given the chance, the Vatican would happily rewrite it. The nativity yarn is a gateway to agnosticism. Trust me, I speak from experience!

And yet in churches far and wide, the story is repeated, year after year, decade after decade, century after century. Nativity sets are standard-issue Christmas decorations. We even have one. Life-size manger scenes pop up on lawns. Christmas pageants are presented retelling the story, with children dressed as watchful shepherds and Eastern kings. Every year on TV, Linus monologues about it. There is something compelling about the nativity, or it would have faded away long ago. Is it the fact that the presumed Son of God was born in a barn? (Deities: They’re Just Like Us!) Do we have great sympathy for the struggles of new parents? Is it the supernatural flourishes in the tale, as in that first Harry Potter book, that make us, the reader, realize with delight that the infant is the Chosen One? Or is it simply a nice little allegory about hope, and new possibilities, and positive change?

The poet William Butler Yeats, an Irish Protestant who got heavy into mysticism around the turn of the last century, found both poetical and occult inspiration in the nativity fable. He held very specific and kind of kooky beliefs about the nature of things. As summarized in his biographical entry at the Poetry Foundation, Yeats

believed that certain patterns existed, the most important being what he called gyres, interpenetrating cones representing mixtures of opposites of both a personal and historical nature. He contended that gyres were initiated by the divine impregnation of a mortal woman—first, the rape of Leda by Zeus; later, the immaculate conception of Mary. Yeats found that within each 2,000-year era, emblematic moments occurred at the midpoints of the 1000-year halves. At these moments of balance, he believed, a civilization could achieve special excellence, and Yeats cited as examples the splendor of Athens at 500 B.C., Byzantium at A.D. 500, and the Italian Renaissance at A.D. 1500.

Writing during the cataclysmic Great War, Yeats understandably felt that the 2,000-year era was drawing to a close. In “The Magi,” published in Responsibilities in 1916, he presents a deeper, darker take on the appearance in Bethlehem of the wise men:

Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

Weird, right? And not particularly Christmassy. Certainly the image Yeats conjures here does not square with the nativity set in my living room.

This is a product of his own imagination—a vision—but it is everlasting, unchanging. Silver helmets against blue skies, pale faces like smooth stones, floating in and out of view like clouds. His magi are not astrologers traveling from the East; they are celestial entities looking down from above.

From the Gospels and from that insipid “We Three Kings” carol, we know that there were three magi. But Yeats does not number them here. If anything, the repetition of the word all—all times, all their ancient faces, all their helms of silver, all their eyes—suggests a preponderance of them. There is no talk of wisdom, but twice we are told that the pale ones are “unsatisfied.” If wise, they are also disappointed.

Calvary—from calvariae locum, or Place of the Skull—is the hill on which Jesus was crucified. Thus the last two lines of the poem reference both the place of Christ’s death and His birth, in that order. The “turbulence” set in motion by Calvary refers to the subsequent two millennia of Christian history, with its internecine conflicts, its indiscriminate slaughters, its holy wars, its crusades, its persecutions and pogroms, its bloodshed, its stubborn inability to make the peace that Jesus wanted.

What is born in the barn is not named in the poem, or even given corporeal shape: it is an “uncontrollable mystery.” Once set in motion, the gyre spins, and the magi can do nothing but watch: round and round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows. As the wheel slows to a halt, they are as disappointed as a contestant on Wheel of Fortune landing on BANKRUPT.

Finally, “bestial floor” is a notably ugly, an almost profane, way to characterize the nativity site. But there is hope here, too. What’s past is past. The gyre has gone through its long 20-century cycle. Once again, humanity has shown itself to be bestial: violent, ruthless, harsh. But that era is over now. Things are about to change.

And that curious last word: floor. This, Yeats is telling us, this right here? This is the bottom.

There is nowhere to go but up.

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Photo credit: JR P. “Gyre” by Thomas Sayre (1999) North Carolina Museum of Art.